Rented Land

For most of my career, the bulk of my traffic came through a system I did not own. I have also spent most of my career running systems that other companies depended on for theirs. I have been on both ends of the lease.

As a tenant

In 2014 Google removed every one of our websites from its search results. One day the platforms were bringing buyers to providers; the next, the main road to them was closed. We sued, got further than most people expected, and lost in 2017. I have told that story in When I Took Google to Court, and I will not retell it here. Whatever the court decided, the episode showed something simpler: the traffic had never been ours. It had been on loan from a company whose interests were not ours, under terms it could change.

It does not take a delisting to make the point. By 2025 the change was gentler and more general. Answers were appearing above the links, and organic results kept moving down the page. Writing to a partner that summer, I put it in one line:

organic results are ultimately controlled by Google

That is true of every channel you rent. A social network changes what it shows. A marketplace changes its fees or its ranking. A partner who sends you leads decides to send them elsewhere. None of that requires anyone to treat you badly. It only requires them to act in their own interest, which they always will.

As a landlord

The other side of this is that my platforms were rented land for the companies listed on them. Providers paid to be considered and placed in front of buyers researching their category. Their visibility depended on decisions I made: categories, rankings, layout, how much traffic I could earn from search.

In 2009 an agency in New Delhi asked what our traffic was worth to it. My honest answer was that it should not depend on the traffic alone, but on what the agency did with the rankings. That exchange is in Before Anyone Is Looking.

In other words: use what you rent to build something you own. Put the credibility on your own site, in your own proposals, in your own press.

What I would do with that

Count what you own. Your domain, your content, your list of customers and the people who asked to hear from you, your reputation in your own name. Those survive a change of algorithm.

Treat rented channels as acquisition, not as a home. Use them to reach people, then give those people a reason to come back to you directly.

Never build on one. Twenty years of depending mostly on one search engine was a long time to be one policy change away from a bad year.

Read the terms as the landlord would. Ask what the platform gains from you being there, and what would make it stop wanting you. That is the real term of the lease.

Rented channels are worth using. They are not worth mistaking for property.